[exim] (syslog) exim panic event at info level(!)

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Author: Daniel Parry
Date:  
To: exim-users
New-Topics: Re: [exim] (syslog) exim panic event at info level(!)
Subject: [exim] (syslog) exim panic event at info level(!)
Hello,

This is an observation about an interaction between exim and
syslog. I enabled syslog logging on an exim 4.60 instance and I
noticed on testing that panic log events were going in to the
syslog system with level info, instead of at the expected alert
level. Now, the induced panic in question was one that also gets
logged to the main log, which comes through to syslog with level
info. So, in effect you have something akin to:

logger -p mail.info "panic!" && logger -p mail.alert "panic!"

Now syslog (default BSD version), in its infinite wisdom sees the
identical messages and decides that they should both be reported
at the priority level of the first... thus the alert slips through
at level info! Now this is no fault of exim, but it could catch
out the unwary! My workaround is to switch to using syslog-ng
which performs less log summarization than the default linux
syslog application. I wonder if it may be worth mentioning this
issue in the docs, or perhaps panic events should be reported
solely at the panic level when using syslog, or maybe something
else...?

Best wishes,

Daniel

--
--|--------------| Daniel Parry ddp23@??? |--------------|--
"To iterate is human, to recurse, divine."
[Robert Heller]
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